Tivo: a Case Study

The case study was all about the launch of TiVo and the consumer behavior around the product. TiVo was launched in 1999 and didn’t quite receive the response the company had hoped for. As a result the marketing team led an effort to further understand the nature of TiVo’s appeal for existing and potential customers and to encourage other participators such as advertisers and television network to take accountability for TiVo’s relevance in the lives of consumers. The bulk of TiVo’s customer base went from young males to affluent families with the children. The consumer behavior illustrated by the case was all about changing attitudes to reflect perceived enhancements in lifestyle. TiVo users quickly formed emotional attachments to the products as they came to the products as improving their relationships with their families and saving them time for things they enjoyed.

A large part of this case study involved consumers as individuals and their attitudes toward TiVo. After launching in 1999, TiVo received lackluster sales attributed to not only lack of awareness, but just an overall lack of relevant meaning and definition. The TiVo marketing team saw this as a chance to change consumer attitude and reposition the brand in the marketplace as a smart, friendly service that could improve user lifestyle. TiVo recognized early on that users viewed their product as more than just a technology, and even held deep emotional responses to. The attitude is made up of three components: affect, behavior, and cognition and marketers believed there was a gap between cognition and behavior in TiVo consumers: a gap between what consumers understood and what they acted upon. In 2001 TiVo conducted an attitude survey, which they intended to go beyond previous surveys to together information about the deeper impact of TiVo on people’s lives. The survey confirmed that the marketing team had positioned themselves in the market as a life enhancing product and managed to change